Vegans have never been more active in Australia - or drawn so much attention to their cause.Credit:Shutterstock

Like born-again Christians and recovering alcoholics, many vegans credit their awakening to some kind of epiphany; a pivotal, before-and-after moment which allowed them to see the world for what it is, its true essence unmasked, their animal-free futures unfurling before them with rapturous clarity. For some vegans, it was a chance visit to an abattoir, or seeing video of a factory farm, or a conversation with another vegan. For Andy Faulkner, it all began with his penis.

Faulkner is tall and slim, with slightly stooped shoulders, a bald head and small, aerodynamic ears. He is 47, and has been a vegan for six years. "For the first 41 years of my life, I was a typical Aussie barbecue-loving meat eater," he tells me when I meet him one night at a vegan demonstration in the centre of Sydney. "I grew up in a middle-class family. Dad was a policeman, Mum was a cleaner. Eating meat was a way of life for us. Bacon every weekend, steak at night. It was so normalised that I never saw it as an animal – a cow, a duck, or a calf – that was on my plate."

Around his late 30s, however, Faulkner's health began declining. He developed severe back pain and crippling haemorrhoids. He had so little energy that he was struggling to do his job as a primary school teacher. Worse still, he had erectile dysfunction, and was "even looking at using Viagra". One day he was searching the internet for answers when he came across an Australian vegan YouTuber called Freelee The Banana Girl. Freelee, whose real name is Leanne Ratcliffe, is a former cocaine- and speed-using bulimic from Queensland who found fame in 2014 by spruiking a raw vegan diet that consisted of up to 51 bananas a day. Freelee's then boyfriend, Durian Rider (real name: Harley Johnstone), is also an avid vegan whose "fruitarian" diet allowed him to become an endurance cyclist. Suitably impressed, Faulkner began his own banana diet.

"I ate 20 a day for a year. But I still wasn't vegan. I'd go to the fridge at night and grab some chicken."

What really clinched it for Faulkner was Gary Yourofsky. Yourofsky, 48, is an American animal rights activist, who, in 2010, delivered an address to students at America's Georgia Institute of Technology. In the talk, which was filmed and posted on YouTube under the moniker The Best Speech You Will Ever Hear, Yourofsky mounts a searing, 68-minute indictment of humanity's ongoing war against animals – the unrelieved exploitation and routine cruelty – the only logical, ethical response to which is veganism. "That was it," Faulkner says. "As soon as I saw that speech, I went vegan."

The results were gratifying. Within two months, his back pain and haemorrhoids had disappeared, and he was enjoying what he describes as "very firm erections". As with many converts, veganism for Faulkner has meant a 100 per cent, top-to-bottom transformation. It is not just a diet and much less a "lifestyle", but a zero-sum philosophy that entails a thoroughgoing inventory of one's core moral assumptions. Call yourself an animal lover? If you're not a vegan, you can't be an animal lover. Call yourself an environmentalist? Animal agriculture causes up to 18 per cent of global greenhouse emissions – so unless you're a vegan, you can't be an environmentalist.

According to Faulkner, being a true vegan also entails activism. "Put it this way," he says. "If you walk down the street and you see someone beating a dog, are you going to walk past or try to stop it?" After leaving teaching, Faulkner started a business holding discos for primary school kids, but has now reduced his school visits from four a week to one per week. "I don't have any children, so it's enough for me to survive on." He now devotes himself almost full-time to activism. He goes to universities and talks to students, and runs a website called Love All Animals, with videos that allow kids to understand the ethics behind veganism. Right now, his preferred form of activism is the Cube of Truth.

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Originally developed in Melbourne, a Cube of Truth involves activists standing in a square, facing outward, holding signs or, in tonight's case, TV monitors. The monitors, which are powered by a portable generator, play a constant loop of what is possibly the most confronting footage I have ever seen, including piglets in holding pens drowning in their own excrement, cows having their necks sliced open, and live baby male chicks being fed into a macerator, where they are ground up into pet food. "In the egg industry, male chicks are worthless," Faulkner explains, "so they just kill them." (A spokesman for the national industry body, Australian Eggs, says the facility where the footage was taken is no longer operational, and that "current practice is for chicks to be given carbon dioxide gas so they are unconscious before being disposed of".)

I can't help but feel that Faulkner is being a little unfair to farmers, most of whom would not allow their animals to drown in their excrement. "Sure," he says, "there are farms out there that try to minimise suffering, but it's still horrific, because no animal wants to die."

In any event, the footage is proving to be powerfully effective. Most people do double-takes as they hurry by, or stop and stare, holding their hands to their mouths in horror. One young woman appears to be on the verge of tears. Whenever someone shows interest, a Cube of Truther walks over to explain what veganism is about. "People tend to be very confronted by the footage because they're having a mirror held up to them," Faulkner says. "We are forcing this into people's consciousness and making them choose a side, because what is happening to animals is an emergency."

It's hard to think of a time when vegans have been more active or better organised. In the past year, there have been farm invasions and animal rescues. Protesters have stormed steakhouses and food courts, chanting slogans. In April, vegans staged a coordinated wave of nationwide actions targeting farms and abattoirs, including a mass sit-in in front of Melbourne's Flinders Street Station, which brought the city centre to a standstill and resulted in 39 arrests.

The protesters were widely condemned. Prime Minister Scott Morrison called them "green-collared criminals" and "un-Australian". Even some moderate vegans suggested that it had put the movement back 10 years. But according to one of the main organisers, Chris Delforce, making friends was never the point. "People are getting angry," says Delforce. "We're moving away from the 'softly softly' approach, and doing more dramatic stuff to draw attention to the issue."

A Melbourne-based web developer, Delforce is, at 28, an animal rights wunderkind. He is one of three directors of Aussie Farms, the website that sparked controversy in January after posting a map of "animal exploitation facilities" across the country. Last year, he ran for the Animal Justice Party in the Northern Metropolitan Region in the Victorian election. (He got 121 primary votes, or 0.03 per cent of the vote.) He is also a filmmaker, most notably of Dominion, which used hidden cameras and drone footage to investigate farming practices in Australia. (The footage used in Faulkner's Cube of Truth is from Dominion.)

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Chris Delforce was one of the main organisers of a coordinated wave of nationwide activism targeting farms and abattoirs in April, led by some vegan groups .Credit:Joe Armao

The film, which is narrated by the actors Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, and the pop star Sia, was released in April 2018, and had sold-out sessions in New York and Beijing. Delforce celebrated the Australian premiere last year by marching through Melbourne with 3000 other vegans. It was, at the time, the biggest animal rights march in Australia. And yet nothing happened. The media ignored it; politicians were unmoved. The livestock industry barely batted an eyelid.

"The [2018] march was a powerful thing to be part of but in terms of reaching the mainstream media and the bulk of people, it was disappointing," Delforce says.

And so he decided to up the ante. For the first anniversary of Dominion's release, Delforce helped organise April's day of action, including the Flinders Street demonstration, which gained nationwide media coverage. "I respect the vegans who say that this kind of protest is not the way to go," Delforce says. "But it's clear our action was a success. Google Trends show that 120,000 people watched Dominion in the week following the protests.

It's clear our action was a success.

"There are a lot of conversations that wouldn't be happening without those protests."

Notwithstanding Delforce's impatience, veganism is on the rise. Australia is now the world's third fastest growing country for vegan products, with Vegan Australia claiming 500,000 local converts. More and more restaurants are offering vegan options; large supermarket chains, such as Coles and Woolworths, now stock vegan foods, including plant-based sausages and dairy-free cheese. There is now vegan "smoked salmon" (made of carrots) and vegan "prawns" (made of soy protein and ocean-plant extracts). Hungry Jacks offers a vegan cheeseburger in Australia; KFC has just introduced a vegan "chicken" burger in England. There's vegan ice-cream, and even vegan ice-cream for your vegan dog. (Pawesome Peanut Butter, by Australian company Gelatissimo.) It goes without saying that Gwyneth Paltrow is a vegan, but so is Bill Clinton and the world champion boxer, David Haye.

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Police move in on protesters blocking streets at Melbourne’s Flinders Street
Station in April. Credit:AAP

Most of the growth in veganism is being driven by affluent Millennials, whose shopping habits are more likely to take into account food ethics, planetary health and animal welfare. There's also a certain cohort, usually young women, who see veganism as a way of losing weight, an approach that purist vegans like Faulkner regard with suspicion. "This isn't a mundane diet," he tells me. "This is a stance against a massive injustice, against enslavement and murder."

That veganism is in vogue would come as a shock to Englishman Donald Watson, a teetotal woodwork teacher who co-founded the Vegan Society in 1944, after breaking away from the Leicester Vegetarian Society. (Watson came up with the name "vegan" by combining the beginning and the end of the word "vegetarian".) The Vegan Society, which is now based in Birmingham, defines veganism as "a way of living which seeks to exclude – as far as is possible and practicable – all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purposes".

Perhaps the best way to understand a vegan is as a radicalised vegetarian. Vegans avoid not only meat but the consumption and use of all animal products, including cheese, milk and eggs, as well as fish and other marine animals such as oysters and mussels, and the use of leather, wool, fur, down and silk. (Silkworms invariably die in the production of silk.) Vegans can't eat honey, since using "animal secretions" is prohibited, and because queen bees sometimes have their wings clipped to prevent them leaving the hive. Wine is also problematic, because it is often clarified with "fining agents" made from casein (milk protein), chitin (fibre from crustacean shells), and isinglass (gelatin from fish bladder membranes). Zoos are a no-no, as are domestic pets, and you can't have guide dogs, presumably making life hell for blind vegans.

Many people find this a difficult way to live, which is why veganism, despite its recent gains, has yet to take over the world. Indeed, some moderate vegans are now suggesting that, in an effort to grow the movement faster, a little compromise might not be such a bad thing. Would it be the end of the world, they say, if aspiring vegans were allowed to eat the odd oyster, or put a dollop of honey in their tea? This has not sat well with the purists, or "abolitionists" as they are known, for whom veganism is the "moral baseline", the very least a person can do to prevent animal suffering.

The tension between these two schools of thought has sharpened of late, with species decline and the climate emergency fuelling an increasingly febrile debate about what veganism is and isn't. There have been smear campaigns and black bans, online harassment, and accusations of treachery, betrayal and corruption. There is a battle raging for the soul of the movement, and this time it's the vegans on the menu.

American animal rights activist Gary Yourofsky.Credit:Stuart Hampton

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Since its founding in 2011, San Francisco-based Hampton Creek has become one of the most successful vegan food companies in the world. Valued at $US1.1 billion in 2017, the company offers a range of vegan products including cookies, salad dressings, mayonnaise and cultured, or "clean", meat. (Clean meat is grown in a lab from stem cells taken from a live animal without the need for slaughter.) Bill Gates described the company as the "future of food"; vegan commentator Tobias Leenaert said that it has helped normalise plant-based eating, and showed how to make veganism work at scale.

In 2014, however, the company (which had changed its name to Just), signed a contract to supply six different vegan cookies to the Compass Group, a multinational food service provider. Getting that quantity of vegan food onto the shelves would be a big win for animals and the environment. The only hitch was the macadamia and white chocolate chip cookie. Apparently, Just was having trouble finding a vegan white chocolate chip that met with Compass's approval. In order to save the deal, then, the company decided to make the chocolate chips with powdered milk until it could find a suitable substitute. When news of this broke, there was a wave of vegan outrage, with accusations of corporate greed and immorality, and talk of a boycott on all Just products. "I do not know what cows have done to [Just CEO] Josh Tetrick, but it must be something egregious for him to exact revenge by using them in his company's product," read a piece on an online vegan magazine, Ecorazzi.

To Belgian commentator Leenaert, this was a form of insanity. "Can we please get some perspective?" he wrote in his blog, The Vegan Strategist. "Why don't we focus on the incredible amount of [animal] misery that [Just] is preventing, rather than on the tiny amount of animal ingredients that is for the time being still in their products?"

Leenaert is a kind of anti-firebrand; geeky, good-humoured and endlessly accommodating. He lectures a lot, and is the co-founder of the Belgian charity, Ethical Vegetarian Alternative (EVA). In 2017, he authored a book called How To Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach, where he advocates a more forgiving form of veganism, suggesting that vegans stop haranguing meat-eaters and drop the dogma in favour of "friendly activism".

"We have to look for what has enough public support, and then do that," he tells me. "To do things that a large majority of people will be angry at you for, is, I think, not smart." Abolitionists insist that anything other than total veganism is unacceptable, but Leenaert says that is silly, and that being a "part-time vegan" is fine, especially if the alternative is not being vegan at all.

The debate has been supercharged in recent years by the tendency of vegans to compare the animal rights struggle to other social justice issues, such as women's liberation and the anti-slavery movement. In 2015, the vegan Twitter account @veganoso posted an illustration of a man, presumably African-American, hanging from a tree, next to which was a pig strung up by the hooves. The caption read: "Only the victims have changed." Similarly, hardcore vegans often compare initiatives such as Meat-Free Monday to "slavery-free Mondays", or "wife-beating-free Wednesdays", implying that if something is wrong, it's wrong all the time, not just on one day of the week.

Leenaert's moderate approach has made him a target. In 2015, he found himself subject to attacks by abolitionist vegans, who accused him of being a "vegan apologist" and a "reducetarian". ("Reducetarianism", which encourages participants to reduce the amount of meat they consume, was launched in 2014 by Brian Kateman, a lecturer at New York's Columbia University, in an effort to end the battle among vegans, vegetarians and omnivores.)

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Leenaert's most vocal critic has been a 61-year-old Irish activist and academic named Roger Yates, who teaches sociology at University College Dublin and at the University of Wales. Yates runs a blog called On Human Relations with Other Sentient Beings, where he has railed against Leenaert, calling him a phony vegan, a careerist, and a kind of secret agent for carnivores whose "incrementalist" message encourages impressionable young vegans to violate their principles for "some alleged greater good". Yates has also released several attack videos, carefully editing sections of Leenaert's lectures to make it appear as if he was encouraging people to eat animals, that he had told audiences that hardcore vegans were "crazies", and that he would eat a steak for $100,000. (In fact, Leenaert went on to say he would give the money to an animal rights organisation.)

Before long, however, Yates himself came under attack for being too moderate, this time from the grand-daddy of vegan fundamentalism, Gary L. Francione. Francione, 65, is a legal scholar at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, where, in 1989, he became the first academic in America to teach animal rights law in the regular curriculum. He also pioneered abolitionist veganism, one of the central tenets of which is the rejection of "animal welfare". According to Francione, the phrase "animal welfare" is a distraction, since it implies that the problem is how animals are exploited for food and not that they are exploited at all. For the past decade, Francione has waged a virtual jihad against the "new welfarists", as he calls them, including not only Yates but groups such as the Humane Society International, Mercy for Animals, and the Vegan Society, which he has variously described as xenophobic, "happy exploiters" and "a joke". He has bagged British marathon runner Fiona Oakes, then an ambassador for the Vegan Society, saying her idea of veganism was putting on "lipstick" and a pair of "vegan trainers", and, in 2015, he likened the Animals Rights National Conference, in Washington, to a Ku Klux Klan rally.

Veganism has never been more popular, nor its militant activists more organised.Credit:Alamy

Matters came to a head in 2016, when VegFestUK, an influential vegan festival held in London, barred Francione from attending. The event's organisers accused Francione and his team of Facebook moderators of "trying to ruin other people's lives", and inflicting "undeserved psychological damage" on "respected vegan activists across the globe". Francione returned fire, claiming VegFestUK had defamed him, and that its organisers were "sad" and "corrupt".

To some vegans, it felt like a defining moment. "Professor Gary has written some great books," reads a statement on the VegFestUK web page. "We love his ideology and find it very useful." But veganism is a peaceful "social justice movement", and as far as they were concerned, Professor Gary was no longer a part of it.

Francione might be out of favour, but his legacy persists. It's safe to say most of the people who blocked traffic in Melbourne in April were abolitionists. Andy Faulkner is an abolitionist, as is Chris Delforce. Abolitionism pushed veganism to the centre of animal advocacy, giving it an explicitly moral dimension, and radicalising a generation of hitherto innocuous herbivores. As Australian activist Isy Veira puts it: "Eating animals is the wrong thing to do. And there is no right way to do the wrong thing."

Last June, Isy Veira and 30 other activists attempted a mass hen rescue at an egg farm in Lakesland, in western Sydney.Credit:Courtesy of Isy Veira

Veira, who is 40, has a broad face, a nose ring, and thick, dark, curly hair. She works as a parttime teacher's aide. When I meet her in a cafe in Glebe, a vegan-friendly suburb in inner-city Sydney, she is wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with "WE WILL RISE", the war cry of vegan activist group LegionDX, which she co-founded in 2017. LegionDX, she tells me, is "all about direct action – protests, farm invasions, marches". Last Halloween, Veira and other LegionDX members took to the streets in central Sydney, promoting Dominion as "the worst horror movie you'll ever see". Every two months the group pickets the headquarters of the RSPCA, in south-western Sydney's Yagoona, in order to highlight "the hypocrisy of an animal protection agency that ignores farming and slaughter methods that are inherently cruel".

Last June, Veira and 30 other activists attempted a mass hen rescue at an egg farm in Lakesland, in western Sydney. The operation was a success: the owner of the facility was recently convicted of multiple animal cruelty offences and fined $6500. But it also saw 13 activists, including Veira, charged with offences including trespass and property damage. (The case is currently being heard in Liverpool Local Court.)

Traditionally, the animal rights community in Australia has been not so much a movement as a constellation of disparate groups, all with different strategies and goals. Earlier this year, Veira helped pull together nine of these organisations into a collective, called Animal Rights Activism Sydney (ARAS). "We're trying to promote the idea of unity in community," she says. ARAS includes Andy Faulkner's Cube of Truth, LegionDX and The Sydney Animal Save, among others. (The Save Movement focuses on helping animals that are en route to slaughter, by, for example, feeding water to cattle on road trains.) ARAS will enable groups to share resources, encourage participation, and better plan actions so they don't clash. "Right now we're putting together a memorandum of understanding, kind of a code of practice. We don't want people to say, 'That's not who I am as a vegan.' "

Veira has been vegan for five years. "I got turned on to it by my older sister. She had taken the Liberation Pledge, which is when you vow not to be present where products of animal violence are being consumed." Isy has also taken the pledge. "It means that if you ordered a BLT, I'd have to get up and leave," she tells me. Many people who take the Liberation Pledge wear a fork bracelet, made from a fork bent to fit around their wrist; they can also get a tattoo, which is what Isy plans to do soon. "I'm also careful where I sit in restaurants," she tells me. "If someone sat eating meat a couple of tables away, I'd have to leave." She has even been known to confront carnivores at their dinner table. "If they are going to feast on the bodies of dead animals, they have a moral obligation to know where that animal came from, that it lived, suffered and died for them."

I certainly don't respect you for eating meat. It's like not respecting a rapist for raping a woman.

When Veira went vegan, she lost friends because they insisted on taking their kids to the zoo. She is concerned that the steering wheel in her car is partly made from leather, and has been thinking of having it replaced, but isn't sure how to do so without voiding the car's warranty. She also talks a lot about the need to "educate" non-vegans. At one stage, I tell her that I ate some chicken the night before last, and ask if that changes her impression of me. "I certainly don't respect you for eating meat," she says. "It's like not respecting a rapist for raping a woman." Her work as a teacher's aide sometimes brings her into contact with young male offenders. "You eating meat is like those guys. Some of them do really bad things, but apart from those bad actions, they can actually be okay people."

All the vegans I talk to envision a predominantly, or even fully, vegan world. Exactly when this will happen, and what that world would look like, is another matter. Andy Faulkner reckons it will come about in the next 20 years. "In much the same way that we saw the slavery and feminism movements heard, the animals' screams will be heard. As vegans' health thrives, and the plant-based options increase, it is becoming more difficult each day for society to justify hurting animals."

“Pragmatic” vegan Tobias Leenaert has been accused by some other vegans as being a “vegan apologist”, “reducetarian”, “phony vegan” and a kind of secret agent for carnivores.

Tobias Leenaert says that eating animals will be denormalised, in much the same way smoking has been in the developed world. He also thinks it's possible that some forms of animal use will remain, albeit on a "more benign, symbiotic basis. For example, taking wool from sheep who live great lives, or eating eggs at a small scale, from chickens that are not killed."

Naturally, Gary Francione believes a vegan planet would come a lot sooner if people like Leenaert would get out of the way. "We need environmental groups to stop promoting the fantasy of 'sustainable' exploitation and recognise that we need a massive transition to a vegan diet if we are to avert climate catastrophe," he says. "It would also help if more health professionals recognised what many already do: a sensible vegan diet can help prevent many of the illnesses that are killing us." (Nutritionists agree that most Australians would benefit from eating less meat, but going vegan can risk deficiencies in important nutrients, such as vitamin B12, iron, and omega-3 fats, which are most readily available in animal products.)

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In any case, the meat industry doesn't seem particularly worried. "We are respectful of people's food choices," says Graeme Yardy, domestic market manager for Meat and Livestock Australia. "But the figures show that most people are still eating red meat. Research also shows that many people who go vegetarian and vegan eventually convert back to eating meat, for reasons of health, taste or life stage."

The good news for herbivores (human and ruminant) is that veganism tends to be contagious. The more I hang around with vegans, the more my view of food changes. When I see a piece of chicken or mince in our fridge at home, I sense something stir inside me, a tiny candle of conscience, flickering away, deep down. And so one night, I fry up some "fake burger" – a vegan patty I bought in the supermarket. It's made from pea and mung bean protein, together with other, more unlikely ingredients, such as pomegranate powder and apple extract. My daughters go "Urggh" when they see it, but I tell them they don't have to eat it if they don't want to. (They don't.) As it cooks, the patty gives off a reassuringly meat-like pop and wheeze.

When it's finished, I put it in a bun and take a bite. It tastes odd. Not bad, just unusual. A bit nutty, with a residual iron-like base note. I realise that, for the first time in a long time, I'm tasting something entirely new. I might even be tasting the future.